Last time, I posted some R code to help quickly launch many iButton Thermochron temperature dataloggers with the same mission parameters. The R code makes use of a publicly-available command line utility released by the iButton’s manufacturer, Maxim. Of course, Maxim also has a command line utility for downloading the data from those iButtons that you launched already. The code below will make use of that program to download an iButton, give the file a unique name of your choosing, parse the data out into a simple comma-separated-value file (for easy opening in R or Excel), and then … Continue Reading

Practical Computing for Biologists is an ambitious book that primarily aims to demystify many of the problems that most biologists will hit at some point in their research that can be solved with a bit of simple programming. The book does an admirable job of achieving this goal by exposing the reader to a number of freely available programs and techniques for dealing with text files and other data types. Much of the book (Parts 1-4) … Continue Reading